Читать книгу Virgin Earth - Philippa Gregory - Страница 7

J opened his eyes and saw, instead of the whitewashed walls and ceiling of his Lambeth home, a thatched roof, close to his face. Beneath him, wooden boards, not even a straw mattress; a pace away, a young man on a pallet bed, still deep in sleep. He took in, slowly, the watery smell of something cooking, the discomfort of the hard floor, and the irritating itch of a fresh fleabite. He sat up cautiously, his head swimming. The solid wooden floor of the loft heaved under his gaze with the illusion of movement.

‘You can stir yourselves or it’ll be cold!’ came a shout from the woman who kept the lodging house. In one fluid movement the lad, her son, was up and out of bed and down the ladder to the kitchen below. J pulled on his boots, brushed down his breeches, shrugged his waistcoat over his grubby shirt, and followed him.

The woman was spooning a pale yellow mixture from the pot, suspended over a miserly fire, into four wooden bowls. She slapped them onto the table and bowed her head over her callused hands for a brief grace. Another man who had stayed the night sleeping on the floor beside the fire drew up his stool, took out his own spoon and ate with relish.

‘What is it?’ J asked cautiously.

‘Porridge made with Indian corn,’ she replied.

‘You’ll have to get used to it,’ the man said. ‘Indian corn is almost all we eat.’

J smiled. ‘I wasn’t expecting milk and honey.’

‘There’s many that do,’ the woman said shortly. ‘And many that die still hoping.’

There was a short silence.

‘You here prospecting?’ the man asked.

‘No,’ J said. ‘I’m a gardener, a plant collector. I’ve come to collect plants. Authorised by King Charles himself.’ He hesitated for a moment, wondering if he should tell them about the great garden in Lambeth and his father’s reputation as the greatest gardener that had ever been, advisor to the Duke of Buckingham, gardener to the king and queen, one of the greatest collectors of rarities in the world. He looked at the woman’s enfolded, bitter face and thought that he would not.

The man nodded. ‘Will you see the king when you get home? If you get home,’ he added.

J nodded and took a spoon of the porridge. It was bland, the corn boiled to the consistency of paste. ‘Yes. I work for him in his garden at Oatlands Palace,’ he said.

‘Well, tell him that we can’t do with this governor,’ the man said bluntly. ‘Tell him that we won’t do with him, and that’s a fact. We’ve got enough worries to deal with here without having a fat fool set over us from England. We need a general assembly with a voice for every planter. We need a guarantee of our rights.’

‘You’d be imprisoned if you spoke like that in England,’ J pointed out mildly.

‘That’s why I’m not in England,’ the man said shortly. ‘And I don’t expect to live as if I were. Which is more than can be said for the governor who expects to live like a lord with servants in a land where men and women have come to be free.’

‘I’m not his advisor,’ J said. ‘I speak to the king – when I ever see him – about plants and his garden.’

The man nodded. ‘So who does advise him now?’

J thought for a moment. It all seemed a long way away and of little interest in this new country. ‘The queen,’ he said. ‘And Archbishop Laud.’

The man made a grimace and turned his head to spit but then checked the movement when he saw the woman glare. ‘Beg pardon. So he hasn’t called a parliament?’

J shook his head. ‘He hopes to rule without one.’

‘I heard he was halfway to being a Papist.’

‘I don’t know anything about that.’

‘I heard that he has taken so many fines and so much wealth into his own hands that he does not need to call a parliament for them to vote taxes, that he lets his wife worship openly as a Papist, and that daily there are men and women in the country crying out for him to change,’ the man said precisely.

John blinked at the accuracy and malice of the description. ‘I thought you were royalists in Virginia?’

‘Not all of us,’ the man said with a hard smile.

‘Where are you going to find your plants?’ the woman interrupted. ‘There’s nothing grown up and down the river but tobacco.’

‘Surely people farm other crops?’

She shook her head. ‘We keep beasts – or at any rate they keep themselves. But with the fish jumping out of the river and the animals in the forest it’s not worth the labour of doing more than fishing and hunting. Besides, we can trade for anything we need with the Indians. They can do the labour of farming for us. We can all be squires here.’

‘I thought I’d travel round,’ J said. ‘Hire a horse and ride round the country, see what I can find.’

They both looked at him and rudely laughed in his face.

‘Hire a horse!’ the woman exclaimed. ‘There’s not more than half a dozen horses in the whole plantation. You might as well ask for a coach and four.’

J kept his temper. ‘I see I have much to learn.’

She rose from the table and went to the fire. ‘Dark morning,’ she said irritably. She bent to the fire and lit what looked like a little twig of kindling. To J’s surprise it burnt with a bright clear flame at the very tip, like a specially made taper. She rested it on a small holder, placed on the stone hearth for that purpose, and came back to the table.

‘What’s that?’

She glanced back without interest. ‘We call it candlewood. I buy it from the Indians every autumn.’

‘But what sort of wood is it?’

‘Candlewood,’ she said impatiently.

‘But from what sort of tree?’

She looked at him as if he were foolish to be asking something that no-one else cared about. ‘How should I know? I pay the Indians to fetch it for me. D’you think I go out into the woods to gather my own candlewood? D’you think I make my own spoons from spoonwood? D’you think I make my own sugar from the sugar tree or my own soap from the soapberry?’

‘Candlewood? Spoonwood?’ J had a moment of wild imagining, thinking of a tree growing candles, a tree growing spoons, a bush growing soap. ‘Are you trying to make a fool of me?’

‘No greater fool than you are already – what else should I call them but what they are?’

‘What you want,’ the man said pacifically, pushing away his empty bowl and taking out a pipe and filling it with rich golden tobacco leaves, ‘is an Indian, a savage. One to use as your own. To take you out into the forest and show you all these things. Take you out in a canoe up and down the river and show you the things you want to know.’

‘Don’t any of the planters know these things?’ J asked. He felt fearful at the thought of being guided by an Indian. There had been too much talk in London of brown men armed with knives of stone who crept into your house and cut your throat while you slept.

The woman hawked and spat into the fireplace. ‘They don’t hardly know how to plant!’ she said. ‘Everything they know they learned from the Indians. You can find yourself an Indian to tell you what the soapberry tree is. Civilised folks here aren’t interested in anything but gold and tobacco.’

‘How shall I find an Indian to guide me?’ J asked. For a moment he felt as helpless as a child, and he thought of his father’s travels – to Russia, to the Mediterranean, to Europe. He had never asked his father if he had felt fear, or worse than fear: the babyish whimper of someone lost, friendless in a strange land. ‘Where would I find a safe Indian?’

‘No such thing as a safe Indian,’ the woman said sharply.

‘Peace!’ J’s fellow lodger said quietly. ‘If you’re serving the king you must have papers, a safe pass, that sort of thing.’

J felt inside his shirt where the precious royal order was wrapped in oilskin. ‘Of course.’

‘Best see the governor then,’ the man suggested. ‘If you’re from the king and you’ve got some influence at court, the governor’ll have time for you. God knows he has no time for honest working men trying to make a living here.’

‘Does he have a court?’ J asked.

‘Knock on his door,’ the woman said impatiently. ‘Court indeed! He’s lucky to have a girl to open the door for him.’

J stood up from the table. ‘Where shall I find his house?’

‘Set beyond the Back Road,’ the man said. ‘I’ll stroll over with you now.’

‘I have to wash first,’ J said nervously. ‘And get my hat and coat.’

The woman snorted disparagingly. ‘He’ll want to paint and powder next,’ she said.

The man smiled. ‘I’ll wait for you outside,’ he said and went out, closing the door gently behind him.

There was neither jug nor ewer in the attic, nor a mirror. Everything that had to be brought from England was at a premium in the new colony. The most trivial things which J had taken for granted in England were rare luxuries here. J washed under the pump in the yard, flinching from the icy splash, and unconsciously keeping his lips tight shut, fearful of drinking the foul water.

His fellow lodger was waiting for him outside the house, in the shade of a tree, sipping from a mug of small ale. The sun beat down on the blinding dust all around him. He nodded when he saw J and slowly got to his feet. ‘Don’t rush,’ he advised him. ‘A man can die of hurry in this climate.’

He led the way down the track that ran between the houses. The road was no dirtier than a back road in London but somehow it seemed worse, with the heat of the sun beating down on it and the bright light which dazzled J and made him squint. Hens clucked around in the dust and shied away from their strolling feet at every street corner, and every garden, every drainage ditch, was filled with the ungainly sprout and flapping leaves of the tobacco plant.

The governor, when J managed to gain admission to the small stone-built house, did nothing more than repeat the lodging-house woman’s advice. ‘I shall write you a note,’ he said languidly. ‘You can travel from plantation to plantation and the planters will make you welcome, if that is what you wish. There’s no difficulty there. Most of the people you meet will be glad of the company and a new face.’

‘But how shall I find my way around?’ J asked. He was afraid that he sounded humble, like a fool.

The governor shrugged. ‘You must get yourself an Indian servant,’ he said. ‘To paddle you in a canoe. To set up camp for you when you can find nowhere to stay. Or you can remain here in Jamestown and tell the children that you want flowers from the woods. They’ll bring a few things in, I dare say.’

J shook his head. ‘I need to see things where they are growing,’ he said. ‘And see the parent plants. I need roots and seed heads, I need to gather them myself. I need to see where they thrive.’

The governor nodded, uninterested, and rang a silver bell. They could hear the servant trotting across the short hall and opening the badly hung door.

‘Take Mr Tradescant to Mr Joseph,’ the governor ordered. He turned to J. ‘He’s the magistrate here at Jamestown. He often puts Indians in the stocks or in prison. He’ll know the names of one or two. He might release one from prison to you, to be your guide.’

‘I don’t know the ways of the country …’ J said uneasily. ‘I would rather have a law-abiding guide –’

The governor laughed. ‘They’re all rogues and criminals,’ he said simply. ‘They’re all pagan. If you want to go out into the forest with any one of them you take your life in your own hands. If I had my way we should have driven them over the Blue Mountains into the western sea. Just over the distant mountains there – drive them back to India.’

J blinked, but the governor rose to his feet in his enthusiasm. ‘My plan is that we should plant the land from one river to the other – from the James River to the Patowmeck River – and then build a mighty fence and push them behind it, expel them from Eden as if we were archangels with flaming swords. Let them take their sins elsewhere. There’ll be no peace for us until we are undisputed masters of all the land we can see.’

He broke off. ‘But you must take your choice, Mr Tradescant. The only people who know anything of plants or trees in Virginia are the Indians and they may slit your throat once you are in the woods with them. Stay here, safe inside the city, and go home empty-handed; or take your chance. It is a matter of complete indifference to me. I cannot rescue you if you are in the woods with them, whatever the king asks of me, whatever safe passes you have in your pocket.’

J hesitated. He had a moment to appreciate the irony that he had thought he might die on the voyage and had welcomed the thought of his own death, which he had recognised as the only thing to ease his grief. But the thought of meeting his death violently and in fear in unknown woods at the hands of murderous pagans was a different matter altogether.

‘I’ll speak to this Mr Joseph,’ he said at last. ‘See what he advises.’

‘As you wish,’ the governor said languidly. ‘I hope you enjoy your stay in Virginia. Please assure His Majesty that I did everything in my power to assist you, when you get home; if you get home.’

‘Thank you,’ J said levelly, bowed and left the room.

The maid would not take him even for the short walk to Mr Joseph’s house until she had tied a shawl around her shoulders and put a broad-brimmed hat on her head.

‘It’s cool,’ J protested. ‘And the sun is not even overhead.’

She shot him a swift defensive look. ‘There are bugs that bite and a sun which strikes you down, and the heat that comes off the marshes,’ she warned. ‘The graveyard is full of men who thought that the Virginia sun was not yet up, or that the water was good enough to drink.’

With that she said nothing more but led the way to the magistrate’s house, past the fort where the bored soldiers whistled and called to her, and inland up a rough dirt road until she stood before a house which was grand by Virginia standards but would have been nothing more than a yeoman’s cottage in England.

‘Mr Joseph’s house,’ she said shortly, and turned and left him at the rough wood front door.

J knocked, and opened the door when a voice shouted to him to come inside.

The house was divided into two. The largest room, where J was standing, served as the kitchen and dining room. There was no separate parlour. There was a ladder at the back of the room leading to attic bedrooms. A light wooden partition, hardly a wall, divided the master bedroom on the ground floor from the rest of the house. Mr Joseph was sitting at the roughly made table in the living room, writing in a ledger.

‘Who are you?’

‘John Tradescant, from England,’ J said, and proffered the governor’s note.

Mr Joseph read it quickly. ‘I’ve got no native guide for you,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve got no messengers due to arrive either. You will have to wait, sir.’

J hesitated. ‘I wonder if a white person might be free to take me out, now and then. Perhaps a servant or a labourer might be spared from their work.’ He looked at the man’s unhelpful expression. ‘Perhaps just for a few hours?’

Mr Joseph shook his head. ‘How long have you been here?’ he demanded.

‘Just arrived.’

‘When you have been here a little longer you will realise that there is never a spare hour,’ the man said grimly. ‘Never a spare moment. Look around you. Every single thing you see here has to be wrested from this land. Remember your ship – did you see houses as cargo? Ploughs? Baker’s shops? Market stalls?’ He paused for emphasis and then shook his head.

‘You did not, and that is because we can ship hardly anything. All that we need has to be made or grown or wrought here. Everything. From the shingles on the roof to the ice in the cellar. And this by people who did not come here to farm; but came hoping to pick up gold plates from the seashore, or emeralds from the rivers, or pearls from out of every oyster. So not only are we farming with wooden ploughshares that we have to carve ourselves, but we are farming with labourers who have never seen a ploughshare before, wooden or metal! Who have to learn every step of the way. Who are taught by men who came out to mine gold but find themselves growing tobacco. So there is no-one, not a man nor woman nor child, who has a moment to do anything but work.’

J said nothing. He thought of his father who had travelled half way round the world and never came back without his pockets filled with treasures. He thought of the debts at home which would be mounting and only his father and two young children to care for the business of nursery plants and rarities.

‘Then I shall have to go out alone. On my own. For I must go home with plants and rarities.’

‘I can give you an Indian girl,’ the man said abruptly. ‘Her mother is in prison for slander. She’s only in for the month. You can have the child for a month.’

‘What good will a child be?’ J demanded.

The man smiled. ‘This is an Indian child,’ he corrected. ‘One of the Powhatan people. She can pass through the trees as quiet as a deer. She can cross deep rivers by stepping on stones that you cannot even see. She can eat off the land: berries, roots, nuts, the earth itself. She’ll know every single plant and every single tree within a hundred miles of here. You can have her for a month, then bring her back.’

He threw back his head and shouted an order. From the yard outside came an answering shout and the back door opened and a child was thrust into the room, her hands still full of the flax which she had been beating.

‘Take her!’ Mr Joseph said irritably. ‘She understands some English, enough to do your bidding anyway, she’s not deaf, but she’s dumb. She can make noises but not speech. Her mother is a whore for the English soldiers, or a servant, or a cook, or something. She’s in prison for a month for complaining of rape. The girl knows enough to understand you. Take her for a month and bring her back here three weeks on Thursday. Her mother comes out of prison then and she’ll want her back.’

He waved the girl towards J and she stepped slowly, unwillingly forward.

‘And don’t rape her,’ he warned matter-of-factly. ‘I don’t want a half-breed baby nine months from now. Just order her to find your plants and bring you back within the month.’

The magistrate waved them both from the room and J found himself on the doorstep in the bright morning sunlight with the girl like a shadow at his elbow. He turned and looked at her.

She was an odd mixture of child and woman; that was the first thing he saw about her. The roundness of her face and the open gaze of the dark eyes was that of a child, an inquisitive, bonny child. But the straightness of her nose and the high cheekbones and the strength of her jaw would make her a beautiful woman in only a few years’ time. Her head was not yet level with his shoulder, but the long legs and slim long feet showed that she would grow taller. She was dressed according to Jamestown convention in someone’s cast-off shift which reached down to her calves and flapped around her shoulders. Her hair was long and dark, flowing loose on one side of her head; but the other side, around her right ear, was shaved close, giving her a curious, exotic appearance. The skin of her neck and her shoulders, which he could see around the gaping gown, was painted with outlandish blue ridges of tattoos. She was looking at him with apprehension, but not outright fear; looking at him as if she were measuring his strength, and thinking that whatever might happen next she would survive it.

It was that look that told J she was a child. A woman fears pain: the pain inside her body, and the pain of a man’s command. But this was still a girl, since she had a girl’s confidence that she could survive anything.

J smiled at her, as he would have smiled at his own nine-year-old daughter Frances, left so far away in London. ‘Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you,’ he said.

Years later he would remember that promise. The first thing he, a white man, had said to an Indian: ‘Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you.’

J led the girl away from Mr Joseph’s house to the shade of a tree in the centre of what would in England have been the village green, but here was a dusty piece of waste ground between the river and the Back Road. A couple of cows foraged pessimistically around them.

‘I need to find plants,’ J said slowly, watching her face for any signs of understanding. ‘Candlewood. Soapberry. Spoonwood.’

She nodded, but whether she understood him, or was merely trying to please him, he could not tell.

He pointed to the tree. ‘I want to see trees.’ He pointed to where the thick line of the forest fringed the river, beyond the desert of waste ground that the settlers had made around the little town, tree stumps still showing in the new fields, dust blowing away from the exhausted tobacco rows.

‘Will you take me into the woods?’

She looked at him with sudden keen intelligence, and stepped towards him. She put a hand on his chest and then turned from him and mimed walking: a wonderful vivid mime that made J laugh at once. It was the English walk, the rolling swagger of a self-important man walking in ill-fitting shoes. She rolled her hips as English men do when they walk, she picked up her feet as English men do when their blisters are nipping their toes. She nodded at him when she saw that he understood, and then she turned and pointed far out beyond the felled trees to the dark, impenetrable wall of forest. She stood for a moment, and then spread her arms and with a little shudder of movement from the crown of her dark head to her bare feet made him see – see the inexpressible: a tall tree with wide spreading branches. It was an illusion, like a mountebank’s trick; but for a moment J, watching her, saw not girl but tree; saw the movement of wind in the branches, saw the sway of the trunk. Then she stepped away from her mime and looked at him inquiringly.

‘Yes,’ J said. ‘Trees. I want to see trees.’ He nodded and smiled at her, nodded again. Then he stepped closer and pointed to himself. ‘And flowers,’ he said. He bent down and mimed delightedly finding something on the ground, picking it and smelling it.

He was rewarded by a bright smile and then a tiny, half-suppressed chuckle of laughter.

He mimed picking berries and eating them, he mimed gathering nuts or digging roots from the ground. The girl nodded; she had understood.

‘We go now?’ J demanded. He gestured towards the woods, started to march forward to indicate his readiness.

She looked at him from his heavy leather boots to his tall hat. She said not a word but J sensed that his clothes, his boots, his walk, even his very body – so heavy and stiff – seemed to her an impossible burden to take into the woods. But then she sighed, and with a little lift of her shoulders seemed to shrug away the difficulty of how a lumpish overdressed white man could be taken into the forest. She stepped forward and with a gesture of her hand indicated that he should walk behind her, and headed towards the trees at a gentle trot.

Sweat poured off J before they were halfway through the cultivated fields outside the half-opened walls of Jamestown. A crowd of midges and strange, sharply biting moths spun around his head and stung and nipped at every exposed inch of skin. He wiped his face with his hand and it came away dirty with the wings and legs of little bloodsucking insects and left his face sore. They reached the shade of the forest edge; but it was no better. At every pace a small cloud of insects bloomed around his big feet and fastened themselves to every piece of reddening skin.

J swatted and wiped and smoothed his face and his neck and his hands, making a thousand awkward ungainly movements to each one of her gliding paces. She trotted like an animal, with no wasted energy. Her arms were relaxed at her side, her upper body still, only her feet pattered forward in little steps, steadily one before the other in a thin one-track path. J, watching her run, at first thought it was the pace of a little child; but then found he could hardly keep up with her as she crossed the fields and headed for the trees.

The edge of the forest was like the face of a friend with half the teeth knocked out. The girl looked around at the ragged stumps of trees as if she was grieving for the loss of someone’s smile. Then she made that little gesture of her shoulder which said so eloquently that there was no accounting for what a white man might do, and went forward with that slow, very slow trot that was just faster than J’s normal walk, and too slow for his running stride. He was continually walking and then breaking into a run to catch her up and then walking again.

As soon as they were beyond the felled trees she stepped off the path, looked around her, listened for one intent moment and then went to a hollow tree at the side of the path. With one fluid movement she flung the shift over her head, folded it carefully, and stowed it in the roots of the tree.

She was all but naked. A little buckskin skirt covered her privates in front but left her long thighs and buttocks exposed. Her breasts were those of a young girl, pointed and as firm as muscle. J exclaimed, not with desire but with fear, and looked around him. For a moment he thought he might have been entrapped by her, and that someone would spring up to witness that he was with her, looking at her shameful nakedness, and some dreadful punishment would follow.

The forest was silent, there was no-one there but the two of them. At once J imagined that she must be inviting him, seducing him; and he could not deny that she was halfway to being desirable. But then he saw that she was not even aware of him, blind to his rapid succession of fears and thoughts. Without fear, without any sense of her own nudity, without the shame she should feel, she bent to the foot of the tree and drew out a small black jug. She dipped in her fingers and drew out a handful of a reddish grease. She smoothed it all over her body as a rich woman will stroke perfume on her skin, and smiled at J when she straightened up and her body glistened with it.

He could see now that the blue and red tattoos which ringed her shoulder blades went down her narrow back in wild spirals. Only her small breasts and belly were bare of them. The grease had added a redder colour to her skin and a darker sheen to the tattoos. She looked stranger and older than she had on the Jamestown green. Her hair looked longer and thicker, her eyes darker and wilder. J watched this transformation from a child in someone’s hand-me-down clothes to a young woman in her own gleaming skin with a growing sense of awe. She had changed from a serving maid – the child of a criminal serving maid – into a creature of the wood who looked as if she belonged there, and whose skin, dappled with the light through the shifting canopy of the leaves, was almost invisible against the dappled light of the forest floor.

She held out the pot for him to take some grease.

‘No, thank you,’ J said awkwardly.

Again she proffered it.

J shook his head.

Patiently she pointed to the cloud of insects around his face and neck, and J noticed for the first time that there were no midges and moths around her. She thrust the pot towards him.

Squeamishly, J dipped his hand into the pot and brought out a little grease on the tips of his fingers. It smelled rancid like old sweat and well-hung meat. J could not help a swift expression of distaste at the powerful stink, he wiped the grease away on a leaf and shook his head again. The girl was not offended. She merely shrugged and then corked the pot with a bundle of leaves, and put it in a woven bag which she drew out from under the tree trunk along with a small quiver made of reeds holding half a dozen arrows, and a small bow.

The quiver she hung at her side, the bow over her shoulder, the soft woven bag across her body to hang on the other hip. Then she nodded to him briskly, to indicate she was ready. She gestured towards the river – did he want to go along the shoreline?

J pointed towards the deeper trees to their left. She nodded and stepped before him, made that little confident gesture that told him to follow behind her, and led the way.

She moved as quietly as an animal through the shadows and the trees. Not even the arrows in her quiver rattled together. The tiny, almost invisible, track was blocked at every pace by a fallen log or a strand of creeper stretching from one tree to another. She trotted over the one and ducked beneath the other without ever breaking her steady stride. J, out of breath, breaking twigs and kicking stones with his heavy shoes, ducking beneath vines, rubbing his face against the trailing disagreeable stickiness of spiders’ webs and the stinging moths, stamped behind her like a pursuing cart horse.

She did not look around. ‘Well, she hardly needs to look to know that I am following her,’ J thought. The noise alone was enough to alert all of Virginia. But she did not even glance to see if all was well with him. She just went at her slow steady trot, as if having been assigned the task of taking him into the deep forest she need no longer consult him until she delivered him to his destination.

They jogged for about half an hour as J’s breathing went from a pant to a straining, painful snatching for breath, until at last they came to a clearing where she paused and turned. J, who had been watching every step on the treacherous path, though blinded by his own sweat and dazzled by a cloud of stinging insects, dropped to the ground and whooped for air. Courteously she hunkered down beside him, sitting on her heels, and waiting, composed and silent, for the white man to stop panting and mopping his face, and grabbing at his side where he had a stitch and at his ankle where he had a sprain.

Slowly J fell silent. The noises of the wood which had been obscured by his trampling progress rose up all around him. There were frogs croaking from the river behind them, there were crickets singing. There were birds singing in the thick canopy of leaves above them, pigeons cooing, jays calling, and an interweaving of sounds which J, a town boy, could not recognise.

He heard the rasp of his own breath subside and he turned to look at her. She was quiet and composed.

J gave her a small, almost apologetic, smile, and lifted his hand to the neck of his thick linen shirt and flapped it to indicate his heat. She nodded solemnly and pointed to his thick jacket.

J, feeling every inch a fool, slid his arms out of the sleeves and handed it to her. She folded it as carefully as a housewife in England and put it beside them and scattered a handful of leaves and moss on it. At once it had disappeared. J blinked. He could not even see the outline of it. She had hidden it completely.

She turned and pointed at his breeches and his boots. J shook his head.

Again she pointed at his breeches and mimed pulling them down. J, feeling like an aged virgin clutching to modesty, held the waistband tighter to him. He saw the glimpse of a smile cross her face but then she moulded her expression into impassivity. She gave a little shrug which said as eloquently as any words that he might wear his breeches if he chose to be hot and uncomfortable, and keep his boots if he wanted to alert the whole forest by his heavy tread.

She made a small gesture with her hand that said: ‘Here. Trees,’ and then she sat back on her heels and looked at him expectantly.

The trees were coming into leaf. J gazed around in wonderment at the height of them, at the richness of the growth, at the vines which looped one to another and twisted around them. Some of them he could recognise as English trees and he found he was nodding towards them, almost as a man might greet the welcome sight of an acquaintance in a strange land. He saw elderberry bushes, oak, hornbeam, cherry trees, walnut trees and dogwood with a sense of relief. But there was also a jumble, an overwhelming richness of foliage and trunk, bark and small flowers, that he could not name, could not identify, that crowded upon him, all beautiful or interesting, large or shapely, calling for his attention and competing with each other. J rubbed his hand across his sweating face. There was a lifetime’s work here for a plant collector; and he had promised his father to be home by early summer.

He glanced at the girl. She was not watching him, she was sitting on her heels, waiting patiently, as steady and still as the trees around them. When she felt his gaze upon her she looked up and gave him a small shy smile, a child’s smile, as if to say that she was proud of her little cleverness in bringing him to the heart of the wood, happy to wait until she could demonstrate her cleverness at fetching him home. It was a smile that no father could have resisted. J smiled back at her. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘This is just what I wanted.’

The girl did not lead him home until the evening and then her little bag was packed with seedlings that J had dug from the forest floor. J was carrying his hat like a bowl, filled to the brim with tiny tree seedlings, each showing no more than a pair of leaves, a white stem and a trail of little roots. There were more plants packed into the pockets of his breeches. He had wanted to put some in her quiver but she had shaken her head decisively, and when he proffered the plants again, she had stepped back from him to show him why she refused.

In one swift movement the bow came off her shoulder and into her hand, with the other hand she had an arrow out of the quiver and notched on the bow. She was ready with a sharpened reed arrow head in moments. She nodded; her meaning was clear. She could not waste time fumbling with plants in her quiver.

J tried to hide a smile at this child’s seriousness over a child’s toy. She was certainly deft; but the bow was a tiny one and the arrows were as light as their flights: made of reed, tipped with sharpened reed.

‘May I see?’ he asked.

She unstrung the arrow from the bow and handed it to him. At once he realised his mistake. The arrow in his hand was a killing blade. The reed at its head was honed to razor sharpness. He drew it against his thumb and there was no pain, but a fine line of blood bloomed at its touch.

‘Damnation!’ he swore, and sucked his thumb. It might be made of reed, it might be so light that a young girl could carry it all day; but the arrow head was sharper than a knife.

‘How exact is your aim?’ J asked her. He pointed to a tree. ‘Can you hit that?’

She stepped towards the tree and pointed instead to a leaf which was shifting slightly in the wind before the trunk. She stepped back, notched the arrow into the bow and let fly. The arrow whistled softly in the air and thudded into the tree trunk. J stepped forward to look. There were traces of the leaf around the arrow shaft: she had hit a moving leaf at twenty paces.

J made a little bow to her, and meant the gesture of respect.

She smiled, that little gleam of pride again, and then pulled the arrow from the tree trunk, discarded the broken arrow head and replaced it with another, put the arrow back in her quiver and led the way from the forest clearing at her usual trot.

‘Slower,’ J commanded.

She glanced at him. He was clumsy with tiredness, his leg muscles singing with pain, and unbalanced by his burden of seedlings. Again he saw that small smile and then she turned and walked before him with a loping pace which was only a little slower. She paused for a moment in the clearing where he had thrown off his jacket and picked it up, dusted off the leaves and handed it to him. Then she led the way back to the hollow tree at the edge of the forest. She hid her bow and arrow in the trunk and drew out her servant’s shift.

J, after a long day of jogging behind her dappled flanks, was now accustomed to her nakedness. He found that he liked the gleam of her skin better than the crumpled mess of the shift. He thought she was diminished by the gown, she looked less modest than in her proud tattoos and buckskin. He made a little shrug to show his sense that she was returning to some sort of unnatural constraint and she nodded at his sympathy, her face grave.

‘You will stay at my inn tonight,’ J said, pointing down to Jamestown where there were already lights showing and chimneys smoking.

She neither nodded nor shook her head, she was frozen still, her eyes never leaving his face.

‘And tomorrow we shall go out into the forest again. Mr Joseph said you should come out with me every day for a month, until your mother is freed.’

She nodded her consent to that. Then she stepped forward and pointed at the little plants in his pocket and gestured towards the river. She mimed the strong paddling of a canoe, out towards the sea. Her hand gestured to the right, they should go south, she waved, a long way, waved again, a very long way; then she stepped back from him and with her arms spread and her shoulders rounded she mimed for him a tree: a tree with branches that bowed down, bowed down low over still water, spread her fingers: with branches that trailed into the water.

J was entranced. ‘But can we get a canoe?’

The girl nodded. She pointed to herself and held out her hand, pointing to her palm, the universal mime for money. J proffered a silver coin, she shook her head. He drew out his tobacco pouch. She nodded and took a fat handful. Then she pointed his face towards Jamestown, looked into his eyes again as if she were reluctant to trust so stupid a man to find his own way home, and then she nodded at him and turned towards a shrubby bush.

In a second she had disappeared. Disappeared without trace. J saw the little branches of the bush quiver and then she was gone, not even a glimmer of the servant’s smock showing in the darkness. For a moment he waited, straining his eyes against the failing light to see if he could spot her, but she had disappeared as surely as a roe deer will vanish by merely standing still.

J, realising that he would never find her against her will, knowing that he had to trust her, turned his face towards Jamestown as she had bid him and trudged home.

When the lodging-house woman knew that J had spent all day with the Indian girl in the woods, and would spend nights away with her, she was scathing.

‘I’d have thought a man fresh out of England could have done without,’ she said. She dumped in front of him a wooden bowl filled to the brim with a pale porridge.

‘Suppawn,’ his fellow lodger said out of the side of his mouth. ‘Indian cornmeal and milk.’

‘More corn?’ J asked.

The man nodded grimly and spooned his portion in silence.

‘I’d have thought you could have brought a woman from England, if your needs are that urgent,’ the woman said. ‘God knows, the town needs more women. You can’t make a plantation with nothing but soldiers and fools.’

J bent his head and slurped porridge from his spoon.

‘Don’t you have a wife you could have brought?’ the woman demanded.

Grief stabbed J like a knife in the belly. He looked up at her and something in his face silenced her nagging.

‘No,’ he said abruptly.

There was a short embarrassed silence.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘if I spoke wrong …’

J pushed away the bowl, the familiar feeling of grief choking him from his belly to his throat.

‘Here,’ the man offered. He produced a leather bottle from the folds of his breeches and poured a slug over J’s unwanted porridge. ‘Have a drop of Barbados rum, that’s the thing to give it flavour.’ He poured a measure for himself and stirred it in. He waved to J with his spoon. ‘Eat up,’ he said with rough kindliness. ‘This is not a land where a man can go hungry and eat later. Eat up and drink up too. You never know where your next meal is coming from here.’

J pulled his bowl towards him, stirred in the rum and tasted the porridge. It was much improved.

‘The girl is guiding me to plants and trees,’ he said to them both. ‘As I told you, I am a collector. Neither the governor nor Mr Joseph could think of anyone else who could assist me. But she is a good little girl. She is not much older than my own daughter. I should think she is little more than thirteen. She leads me to the forest and then waits quietly and leads me home.’

‘Her mother is a whore,’ the lodging-house woman remarked spitefully.

‘Well, she is but a little maid yet,’ J said firmly. ‘And I would not be the man to abuse her.’

The woman shook her head. ‘They’re not like us. She’s no more a maid than my young mastiff bitch is a maid. When she’s ready she’ll couple like an animal. They’re not like us, they’re half-beasts.’

‘You speak badly of them because of your losses,’ J’s fellow lodger said fairly. He nodded to J. ‘Mistress Whitely here lost her man and her child in the Indian rising of ’twenty-two. She doesn’t forget. No-one who was here at the time can ever forget.’

‘What happened?’ J asked.

The woman lowered herself to the bench opposite him and leaned her chin on her hand. ‘They were in and out of Jamestown every night and day,’ she said. ‘The children stayed in our houses, our men went out hunting with them. Again and again we would have starved if they had not traded with us – food, fish, game. They taught us how to plant: corn and the rest. They taught us how to harvest it and cook it. We would have died over and over again if they had not sold us food. The vicar was going to have an Indian school. We were going to teach them our ways, Christian ways. They were to be subjects of the king. There was not the slightest warning, not the hint of a warning. The chief had been their leader for years and he came and went through Jamestown as free as a white man. We had his own son as a hostage, we feared nothing. Nothing.’

‘Why did you have hostages then?’ J asked.

‘Not hostages,’ she corrected herself swiftly. ‘Adopted children. Godchildren. Children in our care. We were educating them in our ways. Turning them from savagery.’

‘And what happened?’ J asked.

‘They waited and planned.’ Her voice was lowered, the two men leaned forward to hear her, there was something fearful in the way the three white faces went closer together, and her voice dropped to a haunting whisper. ‘They waited and planned and at eight o’clock one morning – Good Friday morning they chose in their blasphemy – all over the country they came out of the bushes, to each little farm, to each little family, to each lone man, they came out and struck us dead. They planned to kill every single one of us without a word of warning reaching the others. And they’d have done it too; but for one little turncoat Indian boy who told his master that he had been ordered to kill him, and the man ran to Jamestown and raised the alarm.’

‘What happened?’

‘They opened the arsenal at Jamestown and called the settlers in. Everyone who was near enough came in and the town was saved, but up and down the river, in every isolated farmhouse, there was a white man and woman with their skull staved in by a stone axe.’

She turned her bleak face to J. ‘My husband’s head was cleaved in two, with an axe of stone,’ she said. ‘My little boy was stabbed through the heart with an arrow head of shell. They came against us without proper weapons, they came against us with reeds and shells and stones. It was like the land itself rose up and struck at us.’

There was a long silence.

She rose from the table and stacked the bowls, callous again. ‘That’s why I have no time for even the smallest girl of theirs,’ she said. ‘They are like stones and reeds and trees to me. I hate every stone and reed and tree in this land, and I hate every one of them. I hate them to their death and destruction. This land will never be home for me until everyone of them is gone.’

‘How many of us died?’ J asked. He said ‘us’ without thinking. This was a war of the dark forests against the white men; of course he counted himself among the planters.

‘Not quite four hundred,’ she said bitterly. ‘Four hundred men and women who wanted nothing more than to live in peace in a little part of a great great land. And then the hunger came.’

‘Hunger?’

‘We had to leave the crops in the field, we were too afraid to bring them in,’ she explained. ‘We all crowded into Jamestown and manned the guns over the wooden walls. It was a bitter winter, and there wasn’t enough to eat. And we couldn’t trade with them as we usually did. We had always traded with them for their winter stores, they always had plenty and they always sold to us. But now we were at war with the very people who had fed us.’

J waited for more.

‘We don’t talk about that time,’ she said shortly. ‘About that winter. We ate what we could, and no blame to those who found what they could.’

J turned to his fellow lodger for an explanation.

‘The graveyard,’ the man said in an undertone. ‘They dug up their dead and ate them.’

The woman’s face was stony. ‘We ate what we could get,’ she said. ‘And you’d have done the same. There’s no such thing as Christian behaviour when you’re starving. We did what we had to do.’

J felt the suppawn dinner rise up in the back of his throat at the thought of what the cook had tasted.

‘We survived,’ she said flatly.

‘I’m sure –’ J stammered.

‘And when the weather got warmer those who were not dead of their wounds, or of grief, or of starvation, died of the plague,’ she went on. ‘All of us packed in to this little town, all of us sick with grief and fear. Hundreds died that winter, and it was all the Indians’ fault. As soon as we could muster men and supplies we went against them. We passed a law and we swore an oath, that not a man or a woman would be left alive.’

The man nodded. ‘We hunted them down like dogs and we pushed them further and further away. It was an order – kill all the men and women and enslave the children. We pretended to be at peace for a while and we watched them plant their crops and commit themselves to their fields, and then, and only then, we went in and destroyed their harvest. They make fish weirs, intricate clever things, we destroyed them wherever we saw them. We drove away the game so that they would starve when they went hunting, we burned them out of their villages so they were homeless, we trampled their crops in the field so they would know hunger as we had known hunger. We took our revenge.’

‘We had some good hunting,’ the woman said reminiscently. She drew three mugs of ale and set them on the table. ‘I remember the soldiers from the fort coming in with the heads of the savages at their belt, and then setting them up along the gate like a gamekeeper stakes up a dead weasel.’

‘And are they finished now?’ J could hear the nervousness in his own voice.

‘Oh yes,’ the man said. ‘This was sixteen years ago, remember, and there’s not been a word from them since. They cannot live without the spread of land for their game and farming, and we have pushed them backwards and backwards towards the mountains. They used to live always on the move you see: winter inland, summer down towards the sea, spring to the fields. Once we built our houses and cleared the forest we drove them out, drove them like a herd of deer into bad foraging.’

‘They must hate us as their worst enemies,’ J said.

Neither of them answered. The man shrugged and lowered his face into his mug.

‘We won, and that’s the main thing,’ the woman said firmly. ‘It’s our land now and if they want to live here they have to serve us. There’s no more schools and teaching of them. There’s no more peace and promises of friendship. If they want to stay in our borders they do as they are bid. They can be our slaves or their blood can water the fields. Nothing else.’

At dawn J was down at the quayside, Jamestown silent behind him and only the gleam of the fires in the bread ovens showing that anyone was awake.

The girl was there before him. She had a small dugout canoe bobbing in the dark water. J surveyed it uneasily. It too much resembled the tree it recently had been. The bark had been stripped off and the sides roughly chiselled so that it was shaped to a point at both ends, the inside had been scorched and then scraped clean; but it still looked nothing more than a small tree: stripped, shaped, and hollowed.

She was seated in the prow, a paddle in the water, waiting for him. When she saw him she looked up and gestured, with a tiny authoritative movement, that he should take his place behind her.

‘Won’t it sink?’ J demanded.

Again she made that small gesture.

J assumed that she could swim, and reminded himself that they were alongside the dock and the ship which had brought him from England was moored at the quayside, within hailing distance. He put his little travelling satchel in the boat and then stepped in himself. At once it rocked and nearly overturned.

J dropped to his knees, and found that the canoe steadied immediately. Before him was a paddle. He drew it out, careful not to move too fast, and put it in the water, on the same side as hers.

She glanced over her shoulder, her child’s face serious, and shook her head. J transferred his paddle to the other side and was rewarded by a grave nod. Then she leaned forward and dug the blade of her paddle into the lapping river water, and they moved slowly away from the wooden pier.

At first J could see nothing, but all his other senses were fully alert. He felt the canoe moving smoothly and easily on the water, the current of the river and the ebb of the tide together drawing them out to sea. He sensed the immensity of the water around them, a great desert of water, and their canoe moving among it like a sleek, dark fish. He could smell the land ahead of them: the salt mud, rank tidewash weed and rotting driftwood; and from Jamestown, falling away behind them, the homely smell of woodsmoke and the rancid stink of the household waste which they tipped at the water’s edge for the tide to take away.

Slowly the sky lightened and J could see the girl’s outline, kneeling in the canoe ahead of him. She bowed forward, digging her paddle into the inky black water. J tried to copy her motion and the canoe suddenly skidded as he got the stroke right. She did not turn her head, she was absorbed in her own task of weaving air and water together.

He could hear the birds stirring in the woods on either side of the river. A thousand single calls and coos and cries were building to a cacophony of sound that drifted over the glassy water towards them. There must be hundreds of thousands of birds in the wood to make such a sweep of sound, and then the river birds started to wake. J heard a clatter of quacking and a huge flight of ducks took off from the bank on his left and headed towards the brightening sky. Gulls were swirling and calling overhead, and then the whole world suddenly went dark as a flock of pigeons, innumerable birds, fled across the sky, blocking the light for minutes and filling the whole shadowy world with the creaking of their wings and the rush of their passage.

J had a sense of a virgin world: a place where man was a stranger, an interloper, who had not left a mark, a world where vast flocks and herds of animals and birds moved, obeying their natural order, and nothing could prevent them. It was a new world, another Eden, a paradise for a plant collector. For the first time in years, for the first time since Jane’s death, J had a powerful sense of hope, of the possibilities before him. If men could make their home in this new land they could make a country like a paradise, rich and easy. Perhaps even he could make a home here. Perhaps he and the children could make a new home here and the old life at Lambeth, London, and the old losses of Lambeth, could be left far behind.

They paddled for an hour to cross the wide river and reach the other bank. Then they turned and followed the south bank eastward, towards the sea. Even though the ebbing tide was taking them downriver they had to paddle to hold the canoe on course, and J’s shoulders and arm muscles were tight with strain after the first hour, but the girl still moved fluidly and easily, as if the delicate feathering of the paddle and the deep digging movement to push the boat forward were nothing to her.

As they drew closer to the bank J saw the virgin woods coming down to the water’s edge and brightly coloured birds flirting from trees to water and back again. Every now and then there was a clearing in the woods and the bare earth of a ploughed field. Sometimes there were black men and white men planting side by side, and they raised their heads to watch the canoe go by. J waved, but the girl stared straight ahead as if she were a little statue, with no curiosity about her fellow men at all.

The sun came up, a pale yellow sun swimming in cloud. The mist was burned off the river and the stinging moths came out and formed a cloud around J’s red, sweaty face. He puffed them off his lips but he could not spare a hand from the paddle to swat them away. He shook his head irritably and the canoe made a little wobble in the water.

At that movement she glanced back and saw him, hot, flushed, irritable, and with one smooth stroke she turned the canoe and plunged towards the shade of an inlet.

The trees closed around them, over their heads, around their backs, they were hidden in a world of green. The girl ran the canoe up on a sandbank and stepped out. She slipped off her servant’s smock, folded it carefully and stowed it in the canoe. Then she pointed commandingly at him.

J took off his jacket, then she pointed at his boots.

‘I’ll keep my boots on,’ J said.

She shook her head. Pointed to the vast reach of water, closed her eyes and mimed a man plunging downwards, dragged under by the weight of his boots.

‘Oh,’ J said. ‘All right then.’

He sat on the wet sand and pulled off his boots, stood before her in his stockings, breeches and shirt. She gestured at the rest of his clothes.

J smiled, shook his head. ‘I’ll keep them on …’

She tugged at his shirt with an impatient little hand, and produced from the canoe, with a flourish, a little buckskin skirt, like her own.

‘Indian breeches?’ J asked.

She nodded.

‘I cannot dress like a savage,’ J said reasonably.

She pointed to the dugout canoe, to herself, to the distance they had come and the distance they were to go. Her meaning was clear. You are travelling like one of the Powhatan, with one of the Powhatan. Why not be comfortable?

‘I’ll get bitten,’ J protested. He made little pinchers of his thumb and finger and pinched at the skin of his forearm, showed her the tiny irritating swellings on the skin of his face.

The girl nodded and produced the jar of grease she had used in the forest the day before, held her own smooth arm for his inspection, turned her little unmarked face towards him.

J looked around him in embarrassment. But the woods were loud only with birdsong and impervious to his shame. There was no-one within ten miles in any direction.

‘Oh, all right,’ he said awkwardly.

He stripped off his breeches, grateful for his long shirt tails which hid his nakedness from her. She held out the buckskin skirt. J struggled to put it on, under his shirt. She stepped lightly around to his back, pulled the shirt out of the way and tied the strings of the apron for him. The soft leather nestled against him like another skin. The air was cool on his legs. J felt white and ungainly, a bleached leviathan beside her slight brown body; but he also felt comfortable for the first time since he had arrived in this painfully humid country.

She gestured that he should take off his shirt. J shucked it over his head and then she presented him with the jar of grease. With a sense of nothing left to lose, J put his fingers into the pot and smoothed it all over his face, his neck and his chest. It smelled dreadful and felt as sticky as honey.

She gave a tiny trill of laughter, and he looked down and saw his white skin streaked with red. She held out her bare arm to show him the comparison. Against her treacle-coloured skin the grease showed only as a darker brown, but J was striped white and red.

He paused, but she clicked at him like someone encouraging an animal, took the pot herself and ducked under his arm. He felt her little hands painting the stuff on his back. Despite himself he felt the tiniest flicker of arousal at the touch. But then she came before him again, and he saw that grave child’s face and the swinging black plait of hair, and remembered that she was a little maid, not much older than his daughter, and under his protection.

J rubbed the grease into his skin. He thought he must look like a mummer at a feast, painted and dressed like a fool. But at least he felt cool. His embarrassment faded, and then he realised also he was no longer being bitten. The grease was repelling the insects that danced in a cloud on the waters all around them.

The girl nodded at him with evident approval and picked up his discarded clothes, folded them and stowed them in the canoe. Then she steadied the canoe while he climbed in again.

Without his breeches and awkward boots, J found he was more comfortable. There was a hollow carved in the wooden floor and without the bulk of his breeches and boots his knees fitted into the space. The wood, slightly porous, was cool and pleasantly damp on his bare legs, the river air blew gently against his naked chest. He put his face up, enjoying the cool breeze on his neck, feeling the sweat on his face cooling and drying. The girl gave him a small triumphant smile and pushed off, stepping into the canoe before him and kneeling in one smooth movement. The canoe barely bobbed in the water. Then she turned it around and paddled it strongly towards the main river once more.

They paddled until midday. J was troubled neither by insects nor by the growing heat of the sun in his face. When the sun was at its highest, the girl turned the canoe into an inlet of the river and ran it ashore.

At once the cool greenness of the trees engulfed them. J got out of the canoe, and staggered a little on his cramped legs. She smiled and went sure-footed as a deer up the sandy beach to the forest. J reached for his satchel and followed her.

She offered him the forest with a little wave of her hand, as a princess might gesture to a visiting ambassador as if to say: ‘my lands’.

J nodded. The girl took his hand and pulled him a little way towards the trees. He was to go and collect whatever specimens he wanted. J paused.

‘What will you do?’

She made a gesture to show that she would stay there. She picked up a few dry sticks and piled them together: she would make a fire. She took a little hoeing stick from the purse at her belt, and mimed digging up roots: she would find food. She gestured towards the trees and mimed sleep: she would find some shelter for them.

‘We stay here tonight?’ J asked, repeating her mime of sleep.

She nodded.

‘I will come back here in a little while,’ he said. He pointed to himself and to the forest, and showed his walking fingers. She nodded, and then mimed herself calling and then a mime of listening.

‘I’m to stay where I can hear you?’ J asked, and was rewarded with a nod and a smile.

Feeling like a child sent out to play, J went to the canoe and pulled on his leather boots, took his bag and went along the shoreline. He glanced back.

She was drawing the canoe higher up the beach, away from the reach of the tide. Then she turned and started collecting firewood. She seemed as comfortably at home in this wilderness as a young woman in the kitchen of her own house. J turned away and wandered further along the shoreline, his eyes at the edge of the wood looking for saplings and little plants in their first flush of spring growth that he might get safely home to England.

He obeyed her order that he stay within earshot, and worked his way in a sweep around their little camp until he emerged on the shoreline on the other side, his satchel bulging with seedlings and cuttings wrapped in damp linen.

She was putting the finishing touches on a shelter for the night. She had bent three saplings together and lashed them to make a low bender. She had roofed them with some wide green leaves and filled in the walls with rushes. The canoe was drawn up before the open mouth of the little hut and tipped on its side as protection, and there was a small fire smoking before the hut and two fishes staked on sharp sticks, waiting to be roasted. J came quietly but she did not jump when she saw him, he imagined that she had heard his every move since he had left her at midday. She nodded gravely as she saw him and then pointed to his satchel.

‘Yes. I’ve done well,’ he said. He opened the flap of the bag and showed her. She nodded her approval and then indicated behind him. She had weeded and dug a little patch of ground.

J felt a sense of real delight. ‘For my plants?’ He pointed to his satchel.

She nodded and looked at him, querying if it was what he wanted.

‘That is excellent!’ J beamed. ‘I shall collect more tomorrow and plant them up here, and only move them again when we go back to Jamestown. Thank you!’

The girl nodded with a little smile and he saw that she relished his praise just as his daughter Frances did. ‘You’re very, very clever,’ he said, and was rewarded by a slight blush and another smile.

She turned to the fire and threw on some dry kindling, and the blaze flickered up. She hunkered down on her heels and fanned the flame with a handful of stiff reeds until the twigs were glowing red, then she took one stick with the spitted fish and gave J the other. She showed him how to hold it above the glowing twigs so that it roasted in the heat but did not catch fire, and to turn it when the skin was brown and crispy.

When it was cooked she tipped the one on her stick on to a broad green leaf and proffered it to J, and then took the one he had cooked which was too dark on one side, and still a little raw on the other. She bowed her head over it for a moment, for all the world as if she were saying grace in a Christian home, and extended a hand to the sky, then turned it palm down to the earth. J realised that she was saying grace, which he had quite forgotten, and he had a momentary uncomfortable sense of confusion as to which of them was the ignorant pagan and which the civilised human. Then she smiled at him and started eating.

It was a firm white fish with a wonderful spicy taste from the scorched skin. J ate with relish, leaving only the bones, the head, tail and fins. When he had finished she drew from inside the canoe a little basket of dried fruit and gave him a handful of berries, dried blueberries. They were like a handful of pebbles in his mouth at first and then their taste seeped out, making his face pucker with their sourness, which made her laugh.

It was growing cold. The sun was behind them, inland behind the high trees. J put some more wood on the fire, and the girl got to her feet. She took a small glowing twig from the fire, went down to the water’s edge, and laid the twig on a shell at her bare feet. From the purse at her waist she took out a small pinch of something and then, without embarrassment, untied the thong of her buckskin skirt and laid it to one side. She picked up the burning twig and the pinch of herbs and, naked, waded into the water. J heard her gasp a little at the coldness of it.

The tide was coming in; the river, a mixture of salt and sweet, lapped at the sand beach. The girl was nothing more than a dark shadow against the dancing, gleaming water. J watched her blow on the glowing end of the twig and then put it to her cupped hand and blow again. She was lighting the herbs. J smelled a sharp, acrid smell like tobacco, carried to him on the onshore wind. Then he saw her scatter the smoking herb on the water.

She washed her face and her body, and then raised her wet head to where the moon was showing low on the horizon and lifted her hands in prayer. Then she turned back to the land and waded out of the water.

J thought of evening prayers at Lambeth, of his dead wife’s faith, and of the lodging-house woman who had assured him that these people were animals. He shook his head at the contradictions. He pulled off his boots and went into the shelter she had built them.

Inside she had heaped two beds of leaves. They were soft and aromatic. J’s clothes were neatly spread over the top of one heap, his travelling cloak on top of it all. J rolled himself up in its comforting smelly wool and was asleep before she had come inside.

J and the Indian girl stayed for nearly a month in the shelter she had built. Every day they went further afield, paddling in the morning in the canoe, and then she would run it aground and fish, or set snares for birds, while J foraged in the undergrowth for saplings and young spring growth. They would come companionably home in the light of the setting sun to the little camp and J would heel in his collection while she plucked the birds or cleaned the fish and prepared the evening meal.

There was a powerful dreamlike quality to the time. It was a relationship like no other. The grieving man and the silent girl worked together day after day with a bond that grew but needed no words. J was absorbed in one of the greatest pleasures a man can have – discovering a new country, a country completely unknown to him – and she, freed from the conventions and dangers of Jamestown, practised her woodcraft skills and observed the laws of her own people for once without a critical white observer judging and condemning her every move, but only with a man who smiled at her kindly and let her teach him how to live under the trees.

They never exchanged words. J would talk to her, as he would talk to his little seedlings in the seed bed she had made for him, for the pleasure of hearing his own voice, and for the sense of making a connection. Sometimes she would smile and nod or make a little grunt of affirmation or give a trill of laughter, but she never spoke words, not in her language nor his own, until J thought it must be as the magistrate had said and that she was dumb.

He wanted to encourage her to speak. He wanted to teach her English, he could not imagine how she could survive in Jamestown, comprehending only the outflung pointing arm or a clip to the head. He showed her a tree and said ‘pine’, he showed her a leaf and said ‘leaf’, but she would only smile and laugh and refuse to repeat what he told her.

‘You must learn to speak English,’ J said earnestly to her. ‘How will you manage if you cannot understand anything that is said to you?’

The girl shook her head and bent over her work. She was twisting supple green twigs into a mesh of some sort. As he watched she made the final knot and held it up to show him. J was so ignorant that he could not even tell what it was that she had made. She was smiling proudly.

She set the little contraption on the forest floor and stepped back a few paces. She dropped to her feet, hunched her back and sidled towards it, her arms stretched before her, her hands shaped like beaks, snapping together. At once she was a lobster, unmistakable.

J laughed. ‘Lobster!’ he said. ‘Say “lobster”!’

She pushed back her hair where it fell over the left side of her face and shook her head in her refusal. She mimed eating, as if to say, ‘No. Eat lobster.’

J pointed to the trap. ‘You have made a lobster pot?’

She nodded and stowed it in the canoe ready for setting at dawn the next day when they went out.

‘But you must learn to speak,’ J persisted. ‘What will you do when I go back to England? If your mother is put in prison again?’

She shook her head, refusing to understand him, and then she took a twig from the fire and walked towards the river and J fell silent, respecting the ritual of casting tobacco on the water, which was the same at dawn and dusk, and which marked her transition from day to night to day again.

He went into the shelter and pretended to sleep so that she might come in and sleep beside him without any fear. It was a ritual he had developed of his own to keep them both safe from his growing fascination with her.

Only on the first night, when he had been so weary from paddling that he could not keep his eyes open, had he slept at once. All the other nights he had lain awake listening to her near-imperceptible breathing, enjoying the sense of her closeness beside him. He did not desire her as he might have desired a woman. It was a feeling more subtle and complicated than that. J felt as he might have done if some precious rare animal had chosen to trust him, had chosen to rest beside him. With all his heart he wanted neither to frighten nor disturb her, with all his heart he wanted to stretch out a hand and stroke that smooth, beautiful flank.

Physically, she was the most beautiful object he had ever seen. Not even his wife Jane had ever been naked before him, they had always made love in a tumble of clothes, generally in darkness. His children had been bound in their swaddling bands as tight as silkworms in a chrysalis from the moment of their birth, and dressed in tiny versions of adult clothing as soon as they were able to walk. J had never seen either of them naked, had never bathed them, had never dressed them. The play of light on bare skin was strange to J, and he found that when the girl was working near him he watched her, for the sheer pleasure of seeing her rounded limbs, the strength in her young body, the lovely line of her neck, the curve of her spine, the nestling mystery of her sex which he glimpsed below the little buckskin apron.

Of course he thought of touching her. The casual instruction from Mr Joseph not to rape her was tantamount to admitting that he might do so. But J would not have hurt her, any more than he would have broken an eggshell in a drawer of the collection at Lambeth. She was a thing of such simple beauty that he wanted only to hold her, to caress her. He supposed that of all the things he might imagine with her, what he wanted to do most was to collect her, and take her back to Lambeth to the warm, sunlit rarities room where she would be the most beautiful object of them all.

J would have lost track of time in the woods, but one morning the girl started to take the thatch from the roof of the little hut and untie the saplings. They sprang back undamaged, only a slight bend in the trunks betraying the fact that they had been walls and roof joists.

‘What are you doing?’ J asked her.

In silence she pointed back the way they had come. It was time to go home.

‘Already?’

She nodded and turned to J’s little bed of plants.

It was filled with heads and leaves of small plants. J’s satchel was bursting with gathered seed heads. With her hoeing stick she started to lift the plants, tenderly pulling at the thin filaments of roots and laying them in the dampened linen. J took his trowel and worked at the other end of the row. Carefully they packed them into the canoe.

The fire which she had faithfully kept glowing for all the days of their stay she now damped with water, and then scuffed over with sand. The cooking sticks which they had used as spits for fish, game birds, crabmeat and even the final feast of lobster she broke and cast into the river. The reeds which had thatched the walls and the leaves which had thatched the roof she scattered. In only a little while their campsite was destroyed, and a white man would have looked at the clearing and thought himself the first man there.

J found that he was not ready to leave. ‘I don’t want to go,’ he said unwillingly. He looked into her serene uncomprehending face. ‘You know … I don’t want to go back to Jamestown, and I don’t want to go back to England.’

She looked at him, waiting for his next words. It was as if he were free to decide, and she would do whatever he wished.

J looked out over the river. Now and then the water stirred with the thick shoals of fish. Even in the short weeks that they had been living at the riverside he had seen more and more birds flying into the country from the south. He had a sense of the continent stretching forever to the south, unendingly to the north. Why should he turn his back on it and return to the dirty little town on the edge of the river, surrounded with felled trees, inhabited by people who struggled for everything, for life itself?

The girl did not prompt him. She hunkered down on the sand and looked out over the river, content to wait for his decision.

‘Shall I stay?’ J asked, secure in the knowledge that she could not understand his rapid speech, that he was raising no hopes. ‘Shall we build ourselves another shelter and spend our days going out and bringing in fine specimens of plants? I could send them home to my father, he could pay off our debts with them, and then he could send me enough money so that I could live here always. He could raise my children, and when they are grown they could join me. I need never go back to that house in London, never again sleep alone in that bed, in her bed. Never dream of her. Never go into church past her grave, never hear her name, never have to speak of her.’

She did not even turn her head to look at him, to see if there was meaning in his quiet whispering.

‘I could make a new life here, I could become a new man. And this year, next year, you will be a beautiful woman,’ J said, his voice very gentle. ‘And then …’

She turned at that, as if she understood the tone of his voice. Turned and looked directly at him, without shame, as if she were about to ask him what he meant – if he were serious. J broke off and flushed. He managed an awkward smile.

‘Well!’ he said. ‘Just as well this all means nothing to you! Better be off!’

She rose to her feet and gestured to the river. Her half-tilted head asked: ‘Which way?’ South into the country, which neither of them knew, or upriver to Jamestown?

‘Jamestown,’ J said shortly, pointing north-west. ‘I have been rambling like a fool. Jamestown, of course.’

He seated himself in the canoe and steadied it with his paddle. It was easier now that they had gone out every day and he had grown skilful. She pushed off the prow of the boat and stepped aboard. They paddled as a team and the boat wove easily along the shoreline, and then they felt the stronger push of the river.

An hour out of Jamestown, where the river started getting dirty and the bank was pocked with felled trees, she called a halt and they ran the canoe ashore. Slowly, unwillingly, they washed off the grease in the water. She took a handful of leaves and scrubbed his back so that his white skin shone through the dark grease and the familiar smell, which he had hated so much on the first day, was dispersed. Together they put on the clothes they must wear in the town, and she shrank into the confines of the ragged shift and looked no longer like a deer in dappled sunlight but instead like a sluttish maidservant.

J, shrugging back into his shirt and breeches after the freedom of the buckskin loincloth, felt as if he were taking on the shackles of some sort of prison, becoming a man again with a man’s sorrows and no longer a free being, at home in the forest. At once the cloud of insects settled greedily on his sunburned arms and shoulders and face. J swatted at them and swore, and the girl smiled with her lips but with no laughter in her eyes.

‘We’ll come out again,’ J said encouragingly. He pointed to himself and to her and to the trees. ‘We’ll come out again some day.’

She nodded but her eyes were dark.

They got into the canoe and began to paddle upstream to Jamestown. J was plagued all the way by the biting moths and the sweat in his eyes, the tightness of the shirt across his back and the rub of his boots. By the time they came alongside the little wooden quay he was sweating and irritable. There was a new vessel in port and a crowd on the quayside. No-one wasted more than a quick glance on the little Indian girl and the white man in the dugout canoe.

They ran the canoe aground at the side of the quay and started to unload the plants. From the shadow of the dockside building a woman came and stood before them.

She was an Indian woman but she wore a dress and a shawl tied across her breasts. Her hair was tied back like a white woman’s and it exposed her face which was badly scarred, pocked all over with pale ridges of scar tissue as if someone, long ago, had fired a musket at point-blank range into her face.

‘Mr Tradescant?’ She spoke with a harsh accent.

J spun to hear his name and recoiled from the bitterness in her face. She looked past him at the girl and spoke in a rapid string of words, fluting and meaningless as birdsong.

The child answered, as voluble as she, shaking her head emphatically and then pointing to J and to the plants and to the canoe.

The woman turned to J again. ‘She tells me you have not hurt her.’

‘Of course not!’

‘Not raped her.’

‘No!’

The bowstring-tight line of the woman’s shoulders suddenly slumped, and she gave a sharp sob, like a cough of vomit. ‘When they told me you had taken her into the woods I thought I would not see her again.’

‘I am a plant collector,’ J said wearily. ‘See. There are the plants. She was my guide. She made a camp. She hunted and fished for us. She has been a very, very good girl.’ He glanced at her and she gave him a swift encouraging smile. ‘She has been very helpful. I am in her debt.’

The Indian woman had not followed all of the words but she saw the glance that passed between them and read correctly the affection and mutual trust.

‘You are her mother?’ J asked. ‘Just … er … released?’

The woman nodded. ‘Mr Joseph told me he had given her to you for the month. I thought I would not see her again. I thought you had taken her to the woods to use her and bury her there.’

‘I’m sorry,’ J said awkwardly. ‘I am a stranger here.’

She looked at him with a bitter line around her mouth. ‘You are all strangers here,’ she observed.

‘She can speak?’ J remarked, tentatively, wondering what it might mean.

The woman nodded, not bothering to answer him.

The girl had finished unloading the canoe. She looked at J and gestured to the plants, as if asking what should be done with them. J turned to the woman. ‘I have to fetch some barrels and prepare these plants for my voyage home. I may take a passage on this ship. Can she stay and help me?’

‘We’ll both help,’ the woman said shortly. ‘I don’t leave her alone in this town.’ She hitched her skirts a little and went down to the shoreline. J watched the two women. They did not embrace; but they stood just inches away from each other and gazed into each other’s faces as if they could read all they needed to know in one exchange of looks. Then the mother nodded briefly and they turned side by side and their shoulders brushed as they bent over the plants together.

J went up to his lodging to fetch the barrels for packing the plants.

They worked until it was dusk, and then they worked again the next day, wrapping the cuttings in earth and damp linen, layering them in the barrel separated by damp linen and leaves, and packing the seeds in dry sand and sealing down the lid. When it was done, J had four half-barrels of plants which he would keep open to the air and damp with fresh water, and one sealed barrel of seeds. He shouted up to the ship and a couple of sailors came down and loaded them for him. At least he would have room to care for them on the voyage home. There were only a couple of people making the return voyage to England. The rest of the space was taken up with the cargo of tobacco.

‘We sail in the morning at first light,’ the captain warned him. ‘You’d best get your things aboard tonight and sleep aboard yourself. I can’t wait for passengers, when the tide ebbs we go out with it.’

J nodded. ‘I will.’ He had no desire to return to the inn and the embittered landlady. He thought if she called the girl a beast in his hearing then he would speak in her defence and then there would be a quarrel and perhaps worse.

He turned to the two women. ‘What is her name?’ he asked the mother.

‘Mary.’

‘Mary?’

She nodded. ‘She was taken from me when she was a baby and baptised Mary.’

‘Is that the name you use for her?’

She hesitated, as if she was not sure she would trust him. But then there was a murmur from the girl at her side.

‘She is called Suckahanna.’

‘Suckahanna?’ J confirmed.

The girl smiled and nodded. ‘It means “water”.’

J nodded, and then the fact of her speaking his own language suddenly struck him. ‘You can speak English?’

She nodded.

He had a moment of profound, unhappy bewilderment. ‘Then why did you never …? You never …? I did not know! All this time we have travelled together and you have been dumb!’

‘I ordered her never to speak to a white man,’ the woman said. ‘I thought she would be safer if she did not answer.’

J opened his mouth to argue – it must be right that the girl should be able to speak, to defend herself.

But the mother cut him off with an abrupt gesture of her hand. ‘I have just come from a month in prison for saying the wrong thing,’ she pointed out. ‘Sometimes it is better to say nothing at all.’

J glanced at the ship behind them. Suddenly he did not want to leave. The realisation that the girl had a name, and could understand him, made her intensely interesting. What had she been thinking during their days of silent companionship? What might she not say to him? It was as if she had been a princess under a spell in a romance and suddenly she had found her tongue. When he had confided in her and told her of his feelings, for his home, for his children, for his plants, she had met his confession with an impassive face. But she had understood, she had understood everything he said. And so, in a way, she knew him better than any woman had ever known him before. And she would know that only yesterday morning he was tempted to stay in this new land; to stay with her.

‘I have to go. I am promised in England,’ he said, thinking that they might contradict him, that he might not have to go, as if the breaking of the spell which had kept her silent might release him too.

The two women said nothing, they simply watched the indecision and reluctance in his face.

‘What will become of you two now?’ he asked, as if their plans might affect him.

‘We will leave Jamestown,’ the woman said quietly. ‘We will go back into the forest and find our people. I thought we would be safer to stay here, my husband and my father are dead. I thought I could live inside the walls and work for the white men. I thought I could be their servant.’ She shook her head. ‘But there is no trusting them. We will go back to our own.’

‘And Suckahanna?’

The woman looked at him, her eyes bitter. ‘There is no life for her,’ she said. ‘We can find our people but not our old life. The places where we used to grow our crops are planted with tobacco, the rivers are thin of fish and the game is going, scared away by the guns. Everywhere we used to run, there is the mark of a boot on the trails. I don’t know where she will live her life. I don’t know where she will find a home.’

‘Surely there is room for your people as well as the planters,’ J said passionately. ‘I can’t believe there is not space in this land … we were out for nearly a month and we saw no-one. It’s a mighty land, it stretches for miles and miles. Surely there is room for your people as well as mine?’

‘But your people don’t want us here. Not since the war. When we plant fields they destroy our crops, when they see a fish weir they break it, when they see a village they fire it. They have sworn we shall be destroyed as a people. When my family were killed they took me into slavery and I thought that Suckahanna and I would be safe as slaves. But they beat me and raped me, and the men will soon want her too.’

‘She could come with me,’ J suggested wildly. ‘I could take her to my home in England. I have a son and a daughter there, I could bring them up all together.’

The woman thought for a moment and then shook her head. ‘She is called Suckahanna,’ she said firmly. ‘She must be by the river.’

J was about to argue but then he remembered seeing Pocahontas, the great Princess Pocahontas, when he was just a boy himself and had been taken to view her as a child might be taken to see the lions in the Tower. She had not been Princess Pocahontas by then, she had been Rebecca Rolfe, wearing ordinary English clothes and shivering in an English winter. A few weeks later she had died, in exile, longing for her own land.

‘I will come again,’ he said. ‘I will take these things to England and come out again. And next time, when I come, I shall build a house here and you shall be my servant and she shall be safe.’

‘How could she be safe with you?’ her mother asked swiftly. ‘She’s not a child, though she’s so slight. She’s near thirteen now, by the time you come back she’ll be a woman. There’s no safety for a Powhatan woman in the white man’s town.’

J thought for a moment and then took the step, the next step, speaking without thought, speaking from his heart, his unexamined heart. ‘I shall marry her,’ he promised. ‘She will be my wife and I will keep her safe and she shall have her own house and fields here. I shall build her a house beside the river and she need fear for nothing.’

He was speaking to her mother but he was looking at the girl. A deep rosy blush was spreading from the coarse linen neck of the shift up to her forehead where the bear grease still stained her brown skin at the dark hairline. ‘Should you like that?’ J asked her gently. ‘I am old enough to be your father, I know. And I don’t understand your ways. But I could keep you safe, and I could make a house for you.’

‘I should like that,’ the girl said very quietly. ‘I should like to be your wife.’

The older woman put out her hand to J and he felt the roughened palm in his own. Then she took her daughter’s hand and joined them together in a hard grip. ‘When you come back she shall be your wife,’ she promised him.

‘I will,’ the girl said.

‘I will,’ J swore.

The woman released them and turned away as if there was nothing more to be said. J watched her go, and then turned to Suckahanna. She seemed at once very familiar, the easy companion of weeks of travelling and camping, and exquisitely strange, a girl on the edge of womanhood, a virgin who would be his wife.

Carefully, as if he were transplanting a seedling, he put his hand to her cheek, stroked the line of her jaw. She quivered as he touched her but moved neither forwards nor back. She let him caress her face for a moment, for one moment only; and then she turned on her heel and ran from him.

‘Come back soon,’ she called, and he could hardly see her in the darkness as she went swiftly after her mother, only her linen shift gleaming in the dusk. ‘Come in the good time, the fruitful time, Nepinough, and I shall make you a great feast and we will build our house before winter comes.’

‘I will!’ J said again. But she was already gone, and the next day at dawn the ship sailed and he did not see her.